Qualcomm Steps Up Attack on Internet of Things

Qualcomm has done well by the smartphone boom, with a market value that currently tops $120 billion. The chip maker is now angling to bring more smarts to the smart home and beyond.

The San Diego-based company, in news pegged to an analyst meeting in New York Wednesday, is introducing an unusual chip line that combines communications functions–including Wi-Fi, and the ability to send data down power lines–with a substantial amount of computing capability.

Amir Faintuch, president of the unit known as Qualcomm Atheros, said the hybrid chips will let relatively simple devices like home gateways, routers and media servers do much more than they do now. Among other things, he said, they can run software to handle jobs like controlling home lighting, humidity and security.

He compared the potential effect of the new Qualcomm Internet Processor to the way the world changed when feature phones were supplanted by smartphones after the arrival of the iPhone in 2007. “We want to do the same for the home,” Faintuch said.

Not that Qualcomm chips aren’t in some home products already. The company in 2011 bought chip maker Atheros Communications for $3.1 billion, a deal that augmented Qualcomm’s cellular expertise with Wi-Fi chips and other products, some of which have been sold in the home.

But Faintuch says the new processor is the first really important product combining technology from San Diego and the former Atheros operations in Silicon Valley. “We think this is probably the most significant fruit coming out of the marriage,” he says.

Such chips may be installed in products sold by telecom carriers or cellular base stations they use, Faintuch says. More broadly, Qualcomm is preparing for the day many more devices add intelligence and connections to the Web–a trend broadly known as the Internet of Things.

Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm’s chief executive, highlights a range of new scenarios when more devices have processors and communications and start collaborating. One is using his own company’s new Toq smartwatch, to discover devices nearby that are capable of exchanging information. (Toq will be available Dec. 2, starting at $349.99).

“We’ve been working with white-goods manufacturers,” Jacobs said in a meeting with Wall Street Journal editors Tuesday. “They are interested in having their goods connect to something on the wrist.”

But Qualcomm is not shutting off the flow of new chips aimed at smartphones and tablets, including some being unveiled before the analyst meeting kicks off Wednesday.

One is an update of the company’s widely used Snapdragon processor line. Among other things, the new chip is designed to be able to capture and play video images using the new 4K standard starting to arrive in Ultra High-Definitions TVs.

To do that, the new Snapdragon 805 supports a new video compression standard called H.265, said Murthy Renduchintala, an executive vice president in Qualcomm’s chip unit.

Qualcomm is also offering updated chips based on the fourth-generation LTE technology, a field where the company had a big head start on rivals. One attribute of a new addition to the company’s Gobi product line is the ability to aggregate different swaths of radio spectrum to boost data bandwidth, Renduchintala said

In some cases, the new chips can download data as fast as 300 megabits per second, compared with a peak of somewhat above 150 megabits, he said.

Products based on the new chips are not expected until sometime in 2014.